NEW YORK (BP) – Volunteers were looking for bodies and finding none, only pieces of former lives in the rubble. David Dean, then-director of missions for the Metropolitan New York Baptist Association (MNYBA), prayed for first responders and others as he wandered the debris field.
Southern Baptist Disaster Relief (SBDR) workers, often gathering at Dean’s office a few miles from Ground Zero, insisted he visit the site just three days after the unspeakable attack of Sept. 11, 2001.
“It was like being at Dachau,” Dean, now 88 and retired to a serene family farm in Tennessee, told Baptist Press. “Body parts is all it was, just body parts. And that doesn’t ever leave you.”
A quarter century later, Dean’s hope is symbolized in a 10-by-5-inch steel cross cut from a beam that broiled in the twin towers’ wreckage, surrounded by five additional buildings that also fell from the quake of the towers’ collapse. Police cut the cross and gave it to Dean, he said.
“And it was big, almost half -inch steel. They cut a cross out, and I wouldn’t take anything for that,” Dean said. “Not everyone has a piece of the World Trade Center. And I guess you could say, there’s a big piece of it in my heart. It will always be there.”
Working with Dean was Lisa C. Rose, at that time director of volunteers and partnerships for MNYBA, and also a founding member of East 7th Street Baptist Church, or Graffiti Church, known for its outreach to marginalized communities. She worked with thousands of volunteers to help the many families trying to heal from the loss of 2,753 lives in New York alone. Elsewhere – at the Pentagon and in a downed plane in Shanksville, Pa., that was intended to crash into the White House – 204 more died.
“I began to hear stories from different people about how God was working in their life because of 9/11, how things had changed in their life,” Rose told Baptist Press. “And then I began to hear stories about people who had died who were very strong Christians and had used their life testimony to encourage other people.”
She asked God why one of the many writers she knew had not written these stories of faith.
“And it was like the Lord said, ‘Hey Lisa, you write it down, because you’re the one who experienced it,” she recalled decades after her prayer.
The result, “As the Towers Fell: Stories of Unshakable Faith on 9/11,” was published in 2003 by New Hope Publishers, the former Woman’s Missionary Union publishing house.
“We thought this would make a good book to encourage others through difficult times,” Rose said of herself and New Hope. “I ended up getting a lot of speaking engagements because of that book, just to talk about how God worked in New York during that time.”
Rose, now working in patient relations at a hospital in Alabama, will mark the 25th anniversary by speaking at a program at Graffiti Church in Manhattan. In 2001, she lived in the missions apartment at MNYBA headquarters and simply spent the night there after the attack, as did Dean and others who were unable to travel home.
The available MNYBA team set up a table outside its office at 72nd Street and Broadway to distribute water to distraught passersby, and opened its chapel to the public.
“People were walking north from the towers,” she recalled. “People trickled through. They would stop and tell us stories about their getting down the stairs, not knowing what had happened. It was quite a day.”
Rose’s wedding was set for Sept. 22 at Metropolitan Baptist Church, at that time dually cooperating with the Southern Baptist Convention. She was married as scheduled, with many SBDR volunteers in attendance.
“We had originally just invited about 150 guests and we had well over 200, and some of them were our disaster relief workers that showed up because they needed encouragement,” she said. “It certainly was a very beautiful, happy day. I think God knew that people needed something happy and something that was inspiring during that time. We were overwhelmed.”
Through the trauma of 9/11, she learned that life is precious, she said, and that our lives are precious to God.
“We need to be aware that we’re not sure what the day will hold, for any of us,” she said. “Those folks walking into those towers that morning to go to work did not know that this was going to happen to them.”
The tragedy also taught her the importance of the two greatest commandments.
“As followers of Christ, our main focus is to love God and love others,” she said. “We get so sidetracked at times by the things that are happening in our world, we forget sometimes that those two commandments were the most important thing that Jesus taught us.”
She handled the trauma by sharing stories of faith, through professional counseling and through fellowship with believers. When she left New York in 2006, she worked 13 years with the Montgomery Baptist Association before transferring to the Montgomery Cancer Center as a patient advocate and volunteer coordinator.
In 2021, she realized she no longer suffered tremendous pain on 9/11 anniversaries, but rather gratitude that so many people responded to those in need.
Rose adopted two sons, Steven and Jason, who suffered various medical challenges and lost Steven to a massive heart attack when he was 26. The pain of 9/11 helped her to accept Steven’s death, knowing that he was a believer and would be whole in heaven.
“I knew without a doubt that the Lord was going to be with me and with his father and with his brother as we walked through this journey,” she said. “I have been a Christian a long time. I had never had such peace in my life as I did during his death, and I truly believe that was because of my experience with 9/11, that it helped me through that grieving process.
“People go through their own 9/11s. It doesn’t have to be towers falling,” she said. “It can be a cancer diagnosis. It can be a death of a family member. It can be a tragic car accident, whatever it may be, most of us will have something in our life that kind of blows us off.”
Since 9/11, Dean himself has suffered a personal cancer diagnosis, the 2016 death of his son Stephen in a car accident at age 46, and the 2025 death of his wife Carolyn at age 84.
“Grief builds upon itself,” Dean said. “Other people’s grief, I feel it with them. I can only say that experience in New York and the other grief of my life has caused me to have a deeper appreciation for the pain that goes along with being alive. I understand what it means to lose a son, to lose a wife.”
Dean composed poetry that Rose included in “As the Towers Fell.” His poem “Hope” is influenced by the steel cross he has to this day.
“Hope is the anchor for the soul, awash in awesome waves of grief,” he wrote. “Hope is the steel that sustains our faith, under direct attack of the enemy.”
